Guernsey and Jersey: the ghosts of occupation linger in all corners

The Ship & Crown does not look like a place full of pertinent stories. It sits opposite the docks in the Guernsey capital St Peter Port, midway along the busy seafront avenue of Esplanade – every inch a workaday pub. The wooden bar is a familiar curve of pump handles and boxes of crisps. The day’s special, advertised in chalk on a dusty blackboard, is chilli con carne with mash, for £8.95. A lone male drinker nurses his pint in one corner.

Then I notice the photos on the rear wall. A blur of black and white, some of them show the building in more dramatic days – in the early Forties, when it operated as the Crown Hotel. And as something else too. During the German occupation of the Channel Islands (June 30, 1940, to May 9, 1945), it was the harbour office for the Nazi authorities. There it is in sepia, the swastika flag above its door. Other images stand out too – of a German military band on Esplanade in 1944, and of mass joy when the end arrived one year later.

These memories will be stirred in the coming weeks as the Channel Islands mark the 70th anniversary of their extraction from the Third Reich’s clutches. The Channel Islands Heritage Festival (April 3-May 11) will be an enormous affair, the biggest cultural event ever staged across the archipelago, encompassing Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Herm and Sark. It will witness pageantry and parades, heritage walks, tours of German fortifications and even kayaking excursions around coastlines that once bristled with menace. And it will culminate in Liberation Day and the weekend around it, with celebrations and concerts in St Peter Port and the Jersey capital, St Helier.

Jersey War Tunnels (Alamy/Getty)

A key reason for such a tribute to the past is clear when I cross Esplanade to St Julian’s Pier – and Guernsey’s Liberation Monument. Here is a granite obelisk, framed by a long bench where the words spoken by Winston Churchill on May 8, 1945 – the day that Germany’s surrender was agreed – are etched in gold: “And our dear Channel Islands are also to be freed today.” What is not recorded are the notes the Prime Minister scribbled at a Cabinet meeting on September 27, 1944, five months after D-Day had sparked the salvation of Europe but ignored the only parts of the British Isles in Hitler’s hands: “Let ’em starve. No fighting. They can rot at their leisure.”

Churchill was referring to the German troops left marooned by Operation Overlord – but the effect was the same for those under their rule. The Channel Islands did not suffer wartime horror in the way of, say, Warsaw or Hiroshima, but these were five hard years and the last of them was a torturous exercise in holding breath and waiting for Berlin to collapse. All the more reason to relish the exhalation, even at a distance of seven decades.

Shards of this grim epoch are visible all over Guernsey. Some are obvious, not least the brutal watchtowers that dot cliffs and beaches – Pleinmont Tower in the south-west, La Prevoté in the south, Fort Hommet in the north. Fort Saumarez, in the west, could only be a remnant of annexation, the invaders having converted a defensive bastion built to fend off Napoleon in 1804 into a vision of hostility. It still monitors the adjacent Lihou Island.

But the extent to which the invasion took root is just as apparent in the almost invisible scars that remain. Castle Cornet, St Peter Port’s guardian, was designed to repel a foe of another vintage, the 13th-century French. But the occupiers who found this 1206-born fortress unprotected – as they found the whole archipelago undefended and demilitarised in 1940 – still made use of it, adding rapid-fire muscle to the medieval ramparts. Their fingerprints linger. On one placement, a swastika and “1942” were scratched into the drying cement.

During the festival there will be tours of “secret” wartime tunnels at the castle, a subterranean experience that can be repeated at the German Naval Signal Headquarters. Here, to the west of the capital, is another concealed wound, a huge bunker that was the hub of German communications in the archipelago. Diligently restored, its chambers offer an approximation of the hive of activity that existed here in 1944 and 1945, all typewriter chatter and semaphore burble. German signage is still daubed on the corridors of a nest that avoided demolition by hiding in plain sight. It was used as a Scout hut in the Sixties and part of it has since been made into a private recording studio.

The Old Government House Hotel (Alamy/Getty)

There are ghosts wherever you turn. The Old Government House Hotel, a refined five-star property at the heart of St Peter Port, makes no loud announcement of the fact that it was the General Staff Headquarters during the occupation. But once you know this, it is difficult not to imagine German officers stalking its lounges.

Elsewhere, near the centre of the island at Les Houards, the German Occupation Museum fleshes out 1940-45 with a fascinating mishmash of artefacts that capture the war in its extremes. On one side, an album of images showing star-crossed lovers Freda Oliver and Paul Schlimbach – she a local girl, he a German soldier, their romance aflame on summer days. She would be Mrs Schlimbach by October 1947, their affair surviving a conflict that millions did not. In another part of the museum are details on the inevitable fate of Guernsey’s Jewish population and on the slave labourers used to build new infrastructure.

This latter abuse comes into focus amid the murk of the German Military Underground Hospital, nearby at La Vassalerie. Largely untouched since the occupiers left, it is a place of quiet horror where the darkness is so pervasive that it seems to cling to my clothes. Walking its dank, rotten passageways amid a constant drip-drip of water, I find myself increasingly unnerved, as if my own echoing footsteps might be those of the prisoners of war worked to the grave in chiselling it from the rock. The hospital saw most action in the wake of D-Day, Germany’s injured brought here to die in windowless wards where no scream could reach the surface. If ever a location were haunted it would be this sad maze.

The completeness of Germany’s former dominion over the archipelago is emphasised by the presence of a near-identical warren on Jersey. The biggest of the Channel Islands lies just 27 miles south-east of its neighbour, one hour away by fast ferry, 15 minutes by air, so swift that I swap one military hospital for another almost instantly. However, the Jersey War Tunnels in St Lawrence are a (relatively) brighter prospect than their Guernsey counterparts, where strip lights have been used to dispel the gloom and museum displays slotted into the vast (yet somehow claustrophobic) spaces. Here are revelatory items galore – transcripts of poisonous letters, angry islanders informing on their neighbours over matters as trivial as hidden coal stores; re-creations of the hospital as it would have looked, with rows of beds and operating theatres; photos of German troops sunbathing on the beach at St Clement’s.

An 18th-century loophole tower (Alamy/Getty)

The museum will embrace the festival, staging a week of events in May that will include the cooking of wartime recipes – limpet stew and parsnip tea – with Jersey chef Shaun Rankin. It is also unveiling a new liberation exhibit which flickers with footage of the denouement – giddy ranks of people flocking excitedly into St Helier as the news of freedom broke; the Union Jack being raised above the Pomme d’Or Hotel.

The hotel is still there, gazing across what is now called Liberation Square, a focal point by the marina where a bronze sculpture, installed for the

50th anniversary in 1995, depicts seven islanders lifting a Union Jack to the heavens. Adjacent, the Jersey Museum and Art Gallery, the island’s main cultural landmark, will play a part in the 70-year bonanza, not least in the form of A Life Defiant, an exhibition on two of Jersey’s most idiosyncratic wartime heroines. Artists, writers and lovers, Claude Cahun and

Marcel Moore widened their remit to resistance during the occupation, impersonating German troops by penning and distributing fake letters of complaint and low morale. In 1944, they were given death sentences for their activities, and six months’ prison time for listening to BBC broadcasts. Cahun – ever scathing of her oppressors – inquired which punishment would come first.

Away on the opposite side of St Aubin’s Bay, Battery Lothringen is another reminder of who she was fighting, a concrete rottweiler whose guns were a constant danger to Allied ships, even after D-Day. Its deep-drilled rooms will be open to visitors during the festival.

I pause to explore it during a drive along the south coast which starts from St Brelade’s Bay Hotel, a retreat whose pretty beachside position saw it transformed into a hang-out for Luftwaffe pilots in 1940. It is a misty morning, and Jersey seems wrapped in its own thoughts as I go east, beyond St Helier to the tiny village of Gorey, where Mont Orgueil Castle, another splendid 13th-century warning to France, keeps an eye on the Cherbourg Peninsula just 17 miles away.

The smoke and sacrifices of the summer of 1944 – notably the battle for St Malo in the August – were visible from here, and many watched from the shore, hopefully at first – then with increasing despair as they realised the Allied flotilla was not coming for them. The Channel Islands deserve their five weeks of remembrance.

A swastika-daubed house in Jersey (Alamy/Getty)

Essentials

Getting there

The Channel Islands are well linked to the British mainland. Airlines serving Guernsey include Aurigny (01481 822886; aurigny.com) flying from Bristol, East Midlands, London City, Gatwick, Stansted and Manchester; Flybe (0371 700 2000; flybe.com), which operates from Birmingham, Exeter, Southampton and Norwich, and offers a connection to Jersey (it also heads direct to Jersey from 16 UK airports); British Airways (0844 493 0758; ba.com), which flies to the island from Gatwick; and easyJet (0843 104 5000; easyjet.com), offering direct links from Glasgow, Liverpool, Gatwick, Belfast, Southend and Newcastle. Condor Ferries (0845 6091 024; condorferries.co.uk) sails between Guernsey and Jersey.

What to see and do

Guernsey

Details on the German Naval Signal Headquarters are available from the Channel Islands Occupation Society Guernsey (ciosguernsey.org.gg). For information on Castle Cornet and Guernsey’s war fortifications, check out Guernsey Museums & Galleries (01481 726518; museums.gov.gg).

The German Occupation Museum (01481 238205; germanoccupationmuseum.co.uk) in Les Houards is open daily 10am-5pm between April and October (Tuesday to Sunday, 10am-1pm, between November and March); entry £5.

The German Underground Military Hospital (01481 239100) in La Vassalerie is open daily 2-4pm in April; daily 10am-12pm and 2-4pm between May and October; entry £3.50.

Jersey

Details on open days at Battery Lothringen and other fortifications are available from the Channel Islands Occupation Society Jersey (01534 768785; ciosjersey.org.uk); £2.50.

Jersey War Tunnels at St Lawrence (01534 860808; jerseywartunnels.com) are open daily 10am-6pm between March and December; entry £11.50. Mont Orgueil Castle in Gorey (01534 853292; jerseyheritage.org) is open daily 10am-6pm from April to October; Friday to Monday 10am-dusk from November to March; entry £11.50.

Jersey Museum and Art Gallery, The Weighbridge, St Helier (01534 633300; jerseyheritage.org) is open daily 10am-5pm between April and October (daily 10am-4pm in November and December; Saturdays only – 10am-4pm – from January to March); entry £9.